Tag Archives: Tesla

Parents and grandparents buy 529 college savings plans as safe investments,
so VA529 chose poorly in Spectra Energy,
the very risky company behind the Sabal Trail fracked methane pipeline now plowing through the Floridan Aquifer drinking water of south Alabama, Georgia, and all of Florida and under the Withlacoochee and Suwannee Rivers against growing opposition.
Maybe you’d like to mention that to
Mary G. Morris, the Chief Executive Officer of Virginia529 College Savings Plan,
the biggest mutual fund investor in both Spectra Energy and in Enbridge, which is buying Spectra.
There’s a handy
VA529 contact form or you can call or write:

Like Tesla’s Powerpack, Ambri’s liquid-metal battery is designed to
provide grid-level storage that can supplement intermittent
renewables like solar and wind, making a grid that depends on
renewables as reliable as one that depends on fossil fuels or
nuclear reactors.

Wednesday night, [Ambri founder MIT Professor Donald] Sadoway welcomed Tesla’s entry to the grid-level
battery industry. The competition, he said, is not between
batteries, but between batteries and fossil fuels.

Rather than wondering “Can we have our own energy
system?” people are going to be wanting to know “Why
can’t we have it?”

This is why early adopters like Alton Burns
and George Bennett matter:
other people start asking: why can’t we have that?
And now that HB 57 is finally law,
lots more people can have solar power without mortgaging the farm.
Then they ask this question: why can’t we have storage?

Elon Musk’s recent reminder that Tesla is working on a house-sized battery
has caused quite a stir, but not enough. Tesla alone isn’t the significant part:
Tesla opening a market for inexpensive home solar storage methods is.
And not all those methods will be batteries: also coming are capacitors,
organic vats, compressed air, and water pumped up towers,
for storage to car- and house- size to municipal- and utility-scale,
all of which will drive solar and wind deployment even faster.

Batteries are just one of many reasons,
including electric vehicles, smart grid, solar and wind power
(including
pass HB 57 and you can profit by getting financing
for your own solar panels),
plus massive savings on health care and electricity bills;
batteries are one of many reasons that fixing climate change will
save us all money, clean up our air and water, expand our forests,
preserve property rights, and make some people rich:

In fact, a recent report suggests that revenue from the distributed
energy storage market — meaning battery packs and other
storage devices located directly at homes and businesses (many of
which now generate electricity through solar) —
could exceed $16.5 billion by 2024.
Another report predicts
$68 billion in revenue in the same time frame from the grid-scale storage market.
This includes large-scale battery packs, hydro-storage systems that
use cheap abundant electricity to pump water uphill to drive
turbines later on, or even solar thermal systems that store energy
as heat in molten salt.

And it’s all happening fast,
so fast your jaw will drop if you’re not paying attention.
So let’s stop talking about the costs of fixing climate change.
It’s not just
no-cost and free, not just in the future but right now;
we’re all actually going to be better off through fixing climate change:
healthier and more prosperous.

There is a big difference between the 19th century horse excrement
crisis and the current 21st century energy crisis,
similar as they may sound.
One was real.
The other is manufactured by the modern equivalent of stagecoach vendors.

In 1898 the first international urban-planning conference convened
in New York. It was abandoned after three days, instead of the
scheduled ten, because none of the delegates could see any solution
to the growing crisis posed by urban horses and their output.

The problem did indeed seem intractable. The larger and richer that
cities became, the more horses they needed to function. The more
horses, the more manure. Writing in the Times of London in 1894, one
writer estimated that in 50 years every street in London would be
buried under nine feet of manure. Moreover, all these horses had to
be stabled, which used up ever-larger areas of increasingly valuable
land. And as the number of horses grew, ever-more land had to be
devoted to producing hay to feed them (rather than producing food
for people), and this had to be brought into cities and
distributed—by horse-drawn vehicles. It seemed that urban
civilization was doomed.